Because we all know how incredibly grounded in reality fighting games like Tekken are.

The Ultimate Fighter is the Ultimate Fighting Championship's reality show, where they set out to find, you guessed it, the one true ultimate fighter. Uriah Hall and Kelvin Gastelum will fight to decide who wins this season of the show, and Hall, in an interview with Fightland, admits that some of his coolest fighting moves came from playing Tekken.

"I would play that videogame [Tekken] so much, and you know, I would go into practice mode and I would have the character, the computer, just spar with me back and forth almost like regular training. And you know, I would just keep playing until I see something that I do or I like and just pick up on it. And for me, I don't know, visually it was almost like my body adjusted to it. So when I started to spar, moves that I would see, it would just come back like that. It's something I couldn't explain. Every time I would see a cool move in Tekken man, I would just practice it till I got good at it. And when I do it in training, they'd be like what the hell was that."

Hall said he used to be asked all the time where he trained, and would often just throw out an excuse because he was embarrassed by the truth, that he trained with a fighting videogame. Tekken has competitive roots dating back pretty far, it is known for having ludicrously long multi-hit combos that players must memorize and time perfectly to pull off. The latest version of the game usually features as a staple in most major fighting game tournaments. While the fantastical characters and locales of Tekken are far from what we would call "grounded in reality," the actual fighting system behind it is based on real-world martial arts.

"I think in any fight, 90% of it is mental," continues Hall, saying that for most fighters, their weakest point is their mind, not their body. His trainer tells us that when he first showed up he knew nothing about fighting except for what he learned in videogames, but when he started his training he took to it like no other. The whole interview seems to suggest that fighting games can help professional fighters become better at what they do.

Seemingly coming full circle, the UFC publishes a series of fighting games known as UFC Undisputed. While Hall isn't in the game as of yet, his prominence in The Ultimate Fighter might net him a character slot in the next edition. I think he would be proud to think that the next generation of MMA fighters could be getting their early training done playing the game as a digital version of himself.

I actually think i remember reading somewhere that some of the things in Tekken are actually based off of real fighting moves and styles so it's not too rediculous to be able to perform some of the moves...as long as he doesn't try to do Devil Jins aerial beam i think he'll be fine.

Infernai:I actually think i remember reading somewhere that some of the things in Tekken are actually based off of real fighting moves and styles so it's not too rediculous to be able to perform some of the moves...as long as he doesn't try to do Devil Jins aerial beam i think he'll be fine.

Many of the things are, while the gameplay takes things to the unreal; many of the characters styles and such are rooted in reality.

The below is taken from Tekkenpedia, most of the styles are real while some are of course artificial.

And I would've posted an awesome video about two guys sparing and putting in Tekken effects, but I forgot the syntax for linking youtube videos.

it's just [ youtube=XXXXX] (without the space between [ and youtube) where XXXX is just the jumble of numbers and letters at the end of the youtube video (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-efQuSlxgWY - you would enter -efQuSlxgWY)

obviously there are flashy moves that just look good on camera, but there are quite a few that are quite good if trained properly :Pof course, it's likely it was simply inspired or based off real life forms to begin with. but still

YouTube is full of martial arts competitions where one fighter pulled off something straight out of Tekken or Virtua Fighter or DoA and knocked his/her opponent out cold. The recent one was a match where the taller opponent didn't maintain distance or stance properly, and his much shorter opponent hit him with a 270 flipping wheel kick in the neck. Time to go night night.

Then again, I have to remember an actual UFC match where one fighter tried a 540 Tae-Kwon-Do roundhouse kick. His opponent simple stepped back, waiting for his opponent to land, and punched him in his now vulnerable face as hard as he could, knocking the showboater out cold.

That's really cool! Imagine if he pulled a 10-hit combo on the show, that would be fantastic.

Infernai:I actually think i remember reading somewhere that some of the things in Tekken are actually based off of real fighting moves and styles so it's not too rediculous to be able to perform some of the moves...as long as he doesn't try to do Devil Jins aerial beam i think he'll be fine.

Now you have me curious about what sort of Fatality the guy would have.

Or True Ogre breathing fire... or Alisa throwing her head at people... or Jinpachi eating people with the additional mouth on his stomach... or Yoshimitsu making a copy of herself and throwing people around... or worse, sticking a sword up his belly... the list goes on.

Heh and they say you should never imitate the moves used in the show! Ok granted that was from live shows like Power rangers but still similar! So I guess with the right training and pratice you CAN learn the moves well for the real ones.

Not too weird - most of the Tekken characters use actual fighting styles so picking up a move or two from there shouldn't be any different than what Mixed Martial Arts is all about right, I mean it's in the name. Perfectly fan as long as he doesn't try to do long combos by bouncing opponents.

Also the reverse - hopefully he doesn't play Tekken like he fights because obviously what works in real life won't work in a combo heavy game like Tekken.

Gatx:Not too weird - most of the Tekken characters use actual fighting styles so picking up a move or two from there shouldn't be any different than what Mixed Martial Arts is all about right, I mean it's in the name. Perfectly fan as long as he doesn't try to do long combos by bouncing opponents.

Also the reverse - hopefully he doesn't play Tekken like he fights because obviously what works in real life won't work in a combo heavy game like Tekken.

I'm reasonably sure there's no rule whatsoever in MMA probiting you from bouncing your oppponent on the floor, or against the cage.

Don't think it's a move my trainer will bring up anytime soon though - there's a few slightly more efficient combo transitions.

Well the thing about tekken is that it's surprisingly faithful in its depiction of real-world martial arts. Sometimes I would play around in it and think "hey, I know that move, we've done it in training not however long ago!"

To me the most interesting are Baek's Hwarang-do and Hwoarang's ITF-style traditional taekwon-do (especially since I practice the latter myself). Maybe the impact of the techniques used and the interaction between tekken characters is as detached from reality as they get but the moves themselves are the genuine article. Exagerated at times, sure, and not ALL of them are the real thing but a large portion of them really are.

Hwoarang even does the ITF patterns in his ending animations! what a nice touch.

Cette:To be fair Anderson Silva has at least one knockout via Double Dragon Style lunging elbow. Then again I'm still unconvinced that he's not in fact a fighting game character escape into the real world.

When I read the title I was actually thinking of when Chael Sonnen tried to do that spinning backfist and basically tripped over Silva.

And come on, you know there are people that started martial arts solely because of Eddie Gordo.

Cette:To be fair Anderson Silva has at least one knockout via Double Dragon Style lunging elbow. Then again I'm still unconvinced that he's not in fact a fighting game character escape into the real world.

Alright here's how it is. with the shit that Silva pulls off in the ring and his ridiculous win-loss ratio I think you know in your heart of hearts that everyones favourite undefeatable superpowered UFC fighter is in fact not human, or from this planet. In fact if this universe was just part of a video game he would have batman level plot armour, that's how ridiculous it gets with what he does (Like the match against person I can't remember, he was getting the shit beaten out of him for all the rounds, almpst at the end of the final round he managed to turn the other guys grapple on him and pin him to the floor and make him tap out.)

I knew somethign was up with him as soon as that Chris Leben fight went down the way it did. Say all the legitimate bad things you want about the man he's got a jaw like a tank and Silva just demolished instantly without a hint of effort.

I knew somethign was up with him as soon as that Chris Leben fight went down the way it did. Say all the legitimate bad things you want about the man he's got a jaw like a tank and Silva just demolished instantly without a hint of effort.

Yeah that was probably it, also the Chris Leben fight. Don't even go there, Silva seems to have some kind of time distortion around his limbs that severely cripple our perception of how fast he's going so what we see as a kick with 100 N of force is actually a kick with 1000 N of force. Mark my words some day Silva is going to get into a bar fight because someone claims he's an alien and will accidently king hit the guy by slapping him.